Texans’ Josh McCown interview makes mockery of process

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USA TODAY Sports

Josh McCown is a great player and a great person, one of the most underrated quarterbacks of the past generation. But McCown should not be considered for a head-coaching position in the NFL. Not yet.

Maybe in time he’ll become a head coach, and maybe he’ll be a great one. Maybe he’ll win Super Bowls. Maybe there eventually will be a bronze bust in the Hall of Fame that looks conspicuously like Dolph Lundgren.

That doesn’t mean that the Texans or anyone else should interview someone with no coaching experience to be an NFL head coach. And it reveals a stunning lack of self-awareness by the Texans, a franchise that has become regarded as the most dysfunctional in football.

Or maybe the Texans are fully aware, and maybe they’ve extended a middle finger to anyone who would say that Jack Easterby isn’t qualified to serve as executive V.P. of football operations and/or that Easterby has owner Cal McNair somewhere between bamboozled and hypnotized. It’s fitting, frankly, that a team with a grossly unfit executive V.P. of football operations would consider a grossly unprepared candidate for coach.

Easterby is so far over his skis that he thinks he’s learned to fly. But the only opinion that matters belongs to McNair, who seems to think Easterby is soaring like an eagle.

In this specific case, the decision to consider McCown for a head-coaching job with no coaching experience becomes an affront to all qualified candidates, regardless of race. And, please, don’t play the “he did coaching as a quarterback” card. All quarterbacks worth their cleats do coaching. Does that mean Philip Rivers, who’ll coach high-school football now that he has retired, should have been interviewed by the Chargers?

Does that mean anyone instantly will be offering head-coaching jobs to Drew Brees or Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers as their playing careers end?

In a cycle that has seen five of six head-coaching jobs go to white candidates and no Black coaches hired, the ultimate indignity has come from the Texans, who have interviewed — and by all appearances are considering — making Josh McCown the head coach without ever working as a coach at the college or NFL level.